


Third Time's the Charm

by fanficcornerwriter19



Category: Noli Me Tangere & Related Works - José Rizal
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Bad Decisions, Developing Relationship, Domestic Fluff, Exes, Ficlet, Fluff and Angst, I'm Bad At Tagging, M/M, Past Lives, Post-Break Up, Some Plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-27
Updated: 2020-05-27
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:08:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24367840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fanficcornerwriter19/pseuds/fanficcornerwriter19
Summary: Ibarra falls in love when he is twenty-two, sitting in a boat on Laguna de Bay.(In which Ibarra breaks the cycle. Companion toDifference.)
Relationships: Elias/Crisostomo Ibarra
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11





	Third Time's the Charm

**Author's Note:**

> Ibarra wouldn't leave me alone, okay? it's not my damn fault he can't take orders. he kept pestering me to write this down and then I couldn't stop. also inspired by _Little Of Your Time_ , btw. just because I'm an idiot. 
> 
> again, sorry for Literally No Tagalog, because I'm a conyo who scribbled this in a hurry.

Ibarra falls in love when he is twenty-two, sitting in a boat on Laguna de Bay. 

Unsurprisingly, neither of them notice and neither of them care. After all, there’s nothing romantic about splinters in your wrist and arguments with your pilot, even if you are dating him. And at twenty-two, a fresh graduate and a new adult, he has very little patience for anything that isn’t romantic. 

Elias, practical and proud, isn’t much older or more tolerant. “You’re the most condescending bastard I’ve ever met,” he says, coldly, and kisses him anyway. 

It’s not sweet, it’s not soft, it’s not fond. It’s angry and it’s rough and he knows it’s just to shut him up, but he kisses back like the most thorough little fool to fall in love and bites like he knows what he’s doing. 

The night Elias walks out of his life for good, the nightmares come again with a vengeance he’s never seen before. He jerks awake no less than five separate times that night, more often than not with hot tears running down his face. There’s so much he never said, never gave, never bothered with; if he’d known beforehand the screaming weight they would put on his heart, he wouldn’t have let his fear or his pride stand so often in his way. 

He sees now, with awful clarity, what it is that made him sink his claws into Elias so viciously. It throbs in his damp, bloodshot eyes, lends his nightmares a horrific significance. 

Even when he isn’t asleep, the dreams come and haunt him, snaking into his thoughts like smoke. He lies in bed and grinds the edges of his mind raw on them; he pretends it’s because of the breakup before he realizes that’s exactly what this is about. 

They’re just dreams, he knows that, but he finds too many parallels for his liking.

He goes to sleep again with a discordant tingling in his chest. Even if he hasn’t had these nightmares for years, he hasn’t forgotten how they end. He hasn’t forgotten why they end like that. 

Whatever it is, he’s probably done it. 

(He knows what it is. He _has_ done it.) 

The wheel has turned, the past has become the present, and just like the coward he is he contented himself with wrapping up in nameless things like he knew what he was getting himself into. 

He contents himself with it a little longer, mixes oblivion into it and chokes the whole bitter thing down. Then he gets up and scratches out a new normality from the dust. It bites at his fingers and leaves them scraped and bleeding, but he will learn to live without Elias if it kills him. 

It doesn’t kill him. 

(Not that he really had to worry about that, did he?) 

It doesn’t kill Elias either, and that’s what really matters. 

Maria drags him on with life and he lets her only because he knows that he must, in the end, leave this behind. The show must go on and the story must continue, even if he has shirts at the back of his closet a bit bigger than he usually wears. Even if he has an empty box in his desk where his father’s watch used to be. Even if he has no idea what to do with the things Elias has shown him. 

Even if he has a strange, terrible dread beside his heart that might not go away as long as he lives. 

As long as Elias doesn’t die, he can bear it. 

He grows up, fills the spaces that used to be Elias with other things he loves, and moves on. The world opens for him the way it didn’t when he was young, welcomes him in a way it didn’t when he was demanding things of it. Maria Clara, Basilio, Isagani—he pieces his life together out of fragments gifted to him and it looks pretty nice, considering. 

The nightmares visit him every now and then, but Elias is not dead and they do not come true. 

One thing that can be said about his youthful stupidity is that he used it all up on Elias, who was, as far as stupid mistakes go, one of the best he could’ve made. The flipside of that is that he’s still being stupid, because no matter how he might try to cleave Elias from him completely, the dread is there and the nightmares are there and so it follows that the love and the memories are there too. 

Still, they don’t interfere with his life; he knows better than to let them. They stay sealed in his chest and only make themselves known when their throbbing gets louder than his heartbeat. 

And then the real Elias comes tramping across his path again and tears them open. 

(It figures. It just _figures_. He should’ve known that if anything was going to happen, it was going to happen after thirteen years; the dreams made sure of that. He even has the beard now, for heaven’s sake. Jesus, he really is the most oblivious idiot, isn’t he?) 

Maybe it’s because of those memories, raw as they are. Maybe it’s because of the look on Elias’s face when he finally realizes who Ibarra is. Maybe it’s because of the familiar guitar song he can hear from across the road. Maybe it’s just because he’s drunk on smog and Elias’s presence. In any case, whatever the reason, he asks, “Do you still have my father’s watch?” 

Elias gives a guilty start. “Do you want it back?” 

“No,” he says. “Not at all.” 

He’ll do this again, he’ll turn the wretched wheel of fate one more time, and what’s more, he’ll _win_. This time round, the story belongs to him and Elias and to no one else. It doesn’t matter what he has to do to make it come out differently; if destiny wants a fight, Elias is worth that and more. 

This time round, he slows down and explores Elias inch by glorious inch: his hands have grown stronger and cleverer, his words more discerning and musical, his eyes less guarded and stern. Now that Ibarra isn’t trying to overwrite everything he hears from Elias, it amazes him how much he has to say. He can’t memorize every word—no one can—but he memorizes the rhythmic timbre of Elias’s voice as he says them, the forceful poetry of his emphatic gestures, the gratified sparkle of his smile when Ibarra buckles down to the minutiae and debates with him for real. 

(He can’t in good conscience call them arguments anymore. The malice has gone out of them.) 

Elias sleeps lightly and wakes at the slightest noise. Elias owns a jacket from his university that he still wears all the time. Elias sometimes gets carsick and prefers to drive rather than ride. 

It’s much easier to remember these things when he’s carving his days and nights around them; when it’s him sleeping beside Elias, when it’s him stealing the jacket, when it’s him sitting shotgun. Even if they slip his conscious memory, as things do, they’re ingrained in his knowledge of Elias and what it is to live a life with him. 

(And at this point Elias is burned into him. He couldn’t forget him if he tried; goodness knows he tried, years ago, and since then he’s only steeped himself deeper.) 

Ibarra falls in love when he is thirty-eight, standing on an overpass on North Avenue. 

Unsurprisingly, neither of them notice and neither of them care. After all, once you have a drawer full of sticky notes written by your boyfriend and a toothbrush in his bathroom and a side of his bed, falling in love is rather redundant. And at thirty-eight, tired and yet not weary of life in the slightest, he barely spares a thought for anything redundant. 

Elias, brilliant and brash, isn’t much wearier or more observant. “You’re the most condescending bastard I’ve ever met,” he says, laughing, and kicks him in the shin. 

It’s light and it’s fond and it’s clearly not meant to hurt. Elias protests not in the least when Ibarra buries himself in his arms, despite the heat, and hugs him back like he’s never known anything else. 

It was a bad idea the first time and the second; Ibarra hopes with all his soul that the third time is the charm and Elias _understands_ now. The words have been buried in the corner beside his heart too long to come easily; he chokes on them when they rise to his throat and he kisses Elias with everything he has, as if he can press the words into Elias’s mouth. 

He knows better by now than to rush him, especially when it comes to perception. Elias is clever; he won’t take too long. In the meantime, Ibarra will keep telling him, as many times as he needs to.

**Author's Note:**

> which life is Ibarra having nightmares about??? is it the canon story? is it an alternate timeline?? you decide.
> 
> also, just to be clear: Ibarra is 22 when he and Elias start dating the first time (in this life), 24 when they break up, and 37 when they meet again. Elias is slightly older, but I never bothered to figure out exactly how much, so that's up to you too ig.


End file.
